Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - Everyone & Dolphins

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Comedian Maeve Higgins and Emma learn why you never want to be recognized by a dolphin and find out where the magic happens.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey guys, I'm Emma Choi and welcome to Everyone and Their Mom, a weekly show from Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. This week we're talking about something cute and gross with Wait Wait panelist, comedian and woman whose biggest fan is my mom, it's Mae Piggins. Hi Mae. Hi Emma. My mom loves you. Well, I'm glad that she likes me.

Yeah. Big news, researchers discovered a gross new glad that she likes me. Yeah. Big news! Researchers discovered a gross new way that dolphins tell each other apart. Tasting each other's urine. Uh-oh. Recent studies found that dolphins are more quote-unquote interested in the urine of dolphins they know. Oh my god. Yeah, that's how I felt too.

And according to the Huffington Post, who reported on it, quote, when one dolphin peed or pooped, the others would swim through the excretions with their mouths open to get a big taste of their friend. And coincidentally, taste of your friend is the name of every one of their moms do perfume line, Maeve. So that's exciting. I didn't realize that you were doing merch.

That's really exciting. And that you're doing merch to appeal to every sense absolutely you know a lot of animals recognize each other by their urine right like dogs and cats and I don't know that's what I was thinking yeah and according to National Geographic like this study is the strongest evidence that animals of the same species identify each other by taste oh they can actually taste yeah so that's why they swim through with their mouths open ah because they can't smell yeah that's why if they come above the water like they're able to smell right i don't know i think i don't know if they can like i don't have nostrils you know yeah i mean they do but i don't know if they can because i when i picture a dolphin i think i

can see like a nose. I think I've seen a dolphin before with a nose ring, actually, like a younger kind of a cool dolphin. And they have a lower back tattoo of another dolphin. Yeah. That's lit. That's awesome. They have a lower back tattoo of a white lady. Maeve, this is such a weird story. I feel like we have to talk to someone who like

really knows what's going on. Yeah, yeah. What's up, Jason? How's Bermuda? Bermuda's fantastic. Would you mind introducing yourself for us? Sure. My name is Dr. Jason Brock, and I'm an assistant professor of biology at Stephen F. Austin State University. I love it. And you led the study on how dolphins recognize each other by tasting each other's pee, right? That is true. I did do that. We love this study. Can you just start by explaining us and walking us through this study? Because we are very fixated on how gross it is. Okay. What we were initially working on is the concept of the dolphin's

signature whistle. So every dolphin basically comes up with a whistle that they give most frequently when they separate from their groups. That's how they find each other because sometimes it's hard to see underwater, right? And so we wanted to figure out, are they really like names the way we have names? And this would be the first evidence of a dolphin or another, any animal, not human, using essentially a noun. And that's a big deal. Yeah. So the way that you do this in animals is that you set up what's called a cross-modal study.

And that's just a really fancy way of saying, I need to test the signature whistle against some other sense. And there were scientists who posted about dolphins in the wild kind of swimming with their mouths open through excretia plumes, was the nice way of saying it. Sure. And so we looked at the possibility of them being able to identify each other kind of the way your dog identifies the other dogs in the neighborhood by sniffing the fire hydrant, except not sniffing, tasting. let him know that urine would be coming out of our little kind of experimental apparatus, which was basically a fancy way of saying a long pole with a little cup at the end with

the pee in it. And we'd walk down the dock and we'd kind of pour that into the water and we'd watch him just open his mouth and his tongue hanging out and he just swims right through it. And then he'd line up again to do it again and again and again. And this was something he wanted to do a lot. So you knew they had each individual whistles or you suspected it, but you needed to see if those names were actually how they identified each other. So you went to P to like check that?

Right. And so we wanted to know, hey, not only do you recognize the sound, but you recognize who owns that sound. And that told us that not only do they remember the whistle, but they remember the whistler as well. That's so cool. Are you, are you fluid and dolphin at this point? Okay. So that is, that is, there are things that I can hear that I'll know exactly which dolphin that is. So there are signature whistles that I know, like in my head, that if I hear it, I'll know exactly which dolphin is whistling. If I have the hydrophone in the water, I can almost describe what's happening without actually seeing what's happening. So sometimes if I hear, that's called a dolphin burst pulse.

And that means there's a fight about to break out. Have you ever heard a dolphin talk to another dolphin about another dolphin behind their back? Okay. So that's the next step in this research now that we know that signature whistles really do work like names we now have to go through all of our old data and interpret when we saw things like a third dolphin reference oh so there are times where we would do playback experiments and we would see dolphins whistle the signature whistles of other dolphins that weren't in the pool. Oh my god, tea. Yeah. Do you know how to say goodbye in dolphin? Well, generally speaking, I don't think dolphins say goodbye.

Oh. I think they kind of go off to another social group, and there's always the odds are they'll bump into each other again. I don't think they have a goodbye. I love that. I think there's always the optimism they bump into each other again. I don't think they have a goodbye. I love that. I think there's, there's always the optimism. They'll,

they'll see each other again. It sounds like a, we have to rename the Irish goodbyes, the dolphin goodbye. Yeah, there's, there is no goodbye in dolphin. Perfect.

Well, this is a fun fact, Maeve. Wait, wait, try to do this story twice, but it was too disgusting to go on the main air, you know?

But you were like, I'll take take it that's perfect for my demographic yeah i mean maybe with maybe we have a lot to learn from these dolphins you know like maybe we should we should start tasting each other's pee to get to know each other maybe we should click and echolocate in in this like in this i think you can tell when people are sick by tasting their urine i don't think it's like i think it's an old old like when witches were like working as healers and stuff i think they can tell by tasting their people literally this is something i saw on outlander which is a tv show that is like a time travel tv show yeah so you know it's not like oh well when i was in university studying medicine this is is from a TV show, Half Remembered.

I think in the olden days, people used to taste each other's pee or like healers would. And they'd be like, oh, I know what's wrong with you. You know, you have, I don't really know what they could tell, but I think they'd be like, you have an attitude problem. They're like, no, they're like, you have like something, your heart apart. It looks something wrong with your kidneys something your heart apart there's like something wrong with your kidneys your heart or something yeah but also in the old days they couldn't really do anything to help yeah they're just like you're gonna die sorry yeah yeah the reason you feel so terrible is because you're gonna die and now you've seen me tasting your pee as well so

good luck with everything yeah i took a class on witchcraft and magic last semester because i go to a liberal arts school and uh like it's crazy to think that like things that gross people out now we're just like no one was grossed out by it back in like you know the the renaissance era you know oh yeah we're so grossed out by like mud and rats but back then it's like rats were their best friends and mud was like their favorite substance it's crazy how far we've come. Yeah, I think you're so right. And people used to hate to shower and stuff too, didn't they?

Yeah, we really reversed. They thought like bathing was like kind of dangerous. Who better to ask about the olden days than my professor? My name is Arianne Sadef-Burous. and my professor. My name is Ariane Sadef-Urus. I am a historian of early America and I taught Emma last semester in a class on witchcraft and magic in the Atlantic world. Yeah, you were my professor. Which was an awesome class. Loved it. And you know, just throwing this out there, would you say I'm your favorite student of all time? I mean, you're up there.

Nice. Definitely my funniest student of all time. Nice. Okay, that's better than anything else for me. I'm going to take that. Well, okay, go with me here. I was talking to a friend and we're wondering, did witches slash healers in the early modern period, the olden days, the 17th century, whatever, taste pee to diagnose people? I think they did. There's a story about like you can taste pee to tell if somebody had diabetes.

If the pee tasted sweet, then that was one way of knowing that the person had diabetes. Wow. Yeah. Well, let me back up a little bit because I didn't contextualize. So this week we're talking about the study. These scientists found out that dolphins like swim through each other's urine and like taste it to recognize each other. And for some reason, just like made me think of our class because I know we talked a lot about like bodily fluids and witchcraft, right? Yeah. So like this isn't an example of like diagnosing somebody, but it does have to do with sort of healing or causing illness. There are these things, I don't know if you remember when we talked about witch bottles. Yes. Yeah. There would be these jars and people would fill it with various things. So pins,

nails, fishhooks, tacks, fingernails, human hair, human teeth, blood and urine. And like, depending on what you wanted to accomplish, it would sort of influence what specific things you put in the jar. And then you would bury it in the ground. And the idea was that if you were sick because of a curse that a witch put upon you, by burying this jar filled with like human excrement and other things upside down in the ground, you would sort of push the curse and the illness back onto the witch. It's pretty, pretty interesting. Yeah, it's pretty gross. And now I'm wondering, does this mean that dolphins are practicing witchcraft, you know, by like, using each other's bodily fluids? Yeah, it seems like back in like the early modern age, like, they had a much higher threshold for like, super gross stuff. as we do um they they didn't have like i don't know the kinds of like soaps and shampoos and whatever else we use and um they were like living most people were living in greater proximity to nature like close to their animals and their their livestock and so things just got kind of gross and and i imagine how much it must have smelled that's something I think about quite often yeah yeah so many smell like a potion of smells and disgusting things yeah I mean they just like think about it like you had to work all the time you didn't have showers you didn't have air

conditioning imagine in the summer like working in the sun all day in a farm like filled with horse manure getting sweaty planting things yeah um if you don't mind we have a game that we want to play with you is that okay yeah absolutely let's do it great okay so we have a game we are calling how magic is it so you're kind of an expert on magic so we're gonna give you something magical and on a yelp review scale of one to five stars. Tell us how magic it really is, okay? Five stars most magic. Yeah. Okay.

First one, Magic the Gathering. How magic is it? Three. Three stars. Okay. Harry Potter. How magic is it? I like Harry Potter.

Five stars. Five stars. Yeah. How about Ouija board? How magic is that? Two stars because I don't get it. I used to have a Ouija board, and nothing ever happened unless I did it myself. Two stars.

Okay, that's generous. Magic Johnson. How magic is he? Very, very magic. Five stars. Five stars. Five stars. Ten stars, if I could.

Yes. Saying Bloody Mary three times into a mirror trying to get her to appear. How magic is it? That's pretty magic. Charms. Saying things. Wanting things to happen. Five stars.

Five stars. Nice. How about the trick when you make a quarter appear behind someone's ear? How magic is it? One star. One star. We all know you're hiding it in your hands. Where's the mystery?

Yeah, dad. Stop doing that trick to me. I want some mystery. I want things I can't explain in my magic. Exactly. Some David Blaine stuff, I guess. Yeah. Lucky Charms being magically delicious.

How magic is it? I really like Lucky Charms, so I'm going to say five stars. Five stars! Five stars. That is a good cereal. How often do you get to eat marshmallows for breakfast? Exactly. Well, whenever you buy the cereal, which is great. Okay, last one. Just like dolphins in general. They're such weird freaks. How magic are they? Dolphins are big time magic. Dolphins are off the charts, 10 star 10 stars greater than magic johnson yeah dolphins 10 000 stars 10 000 stars to the dolphin well awesome thank you so much for coming

on our show this was so fun let me ask you this. So, you know, when you see someone and you don't totally recognize them, they, like, recognize you, but you don't remember their name, you know? Like, I feel like there has to be a better solution than tasting their pee. Oh, so you want to help the dolphins out by giving them a more, like, socially acceptable way of figuring out who's who. Yeah, or humans too like how how do you how do you deal with that situation oh oh that's such a good question I mean I think okay so one thing and this is like a genuine no joke thing you should just always say

if you meet somebody nice to see you because that means yes if you've met them before, it's good. Because then it's so, it's so like, it really throws everyone involved when you say like, nice to meet you. And they're like,

I met you before. Then like you feel bad, they feel bad. So a good thing to say is, nice to see you. In that tone and cadence? Of course. Yeah.

Cadence? Of course. Yeah. Here's my favorite part of the podcast, the credits. This show is brought to you by Wake Wake Don't Tell Me. This episode was produced by Hayley Fager, Zola Ray, and Nancy Seichal, with help from Lillian King, Sophia Hernandez-Simeonides, and Boba Fett. Our supervising producer is Jennifer Mills,

and our malevolent overlord is Mike Danforth. Once again, Lorna White, thank you for helping us with our sound. And thanks to my professor, Dr. Ariane Sedefouris, for being cool about it when I turned my head final in a day late. I always admired your fashion sense in class. Dr. Jason Brooke, thank you for making us love dolphins even more than before. Kind of the queen of the dolphin group. You can follow Jason at Brooke Lab on Instagram. Thank you to my co-host, comedian, and WaitWait panelist,

and future amazing race partner, Maeve Higgins. I'm gonna make your life hell. Make sure you check out her book, Tell Everyone on the Strain I Love Them, which is dope as hell. I'm Emma Choi, and you can find me at WaitWaitNPR and making prolonged eye contact with a pigeon across the alleyway, trying to establish an interspecies friendship. Okay, I'm done. This is NPR.